Never. Stop. Learning.

Aviate launcher on my Android phone! Got my invite last week and have been repeatedly impressed by this app. Devs add new features all the time!

The Files app in Chrome OS is a neat, clean piece of work - if a little sparse. Until just now, I was having an issue with seeing multiple versions of my folders in the Google Drive tab (for example, "Documents (1)", "Documents (2)", etc). The solution was simple: Hold CTRL and click on the gear in the top right corner, then, while still holding CTRL, click "Clean local cache." This fixed me right up, and now Files sees my Drive exactly like the website does. Glad someone thought to put that in!

Any ideas? Let me know below!

It takes more than lectures to make a class. I don’t see why that should be difficult to understand. Yet so many of my university’s classes use lectures as a primary means -- sometimes the only means! -- of communicating information to students. Here’s a thought: some people don’t profit from lectures. In particular, lectures are such a minuscule part of how I learn that I almost consider them irrelevant in my education as a whole. There are much more effective ways for someone like me to learn, yet as students we place such a high premium on attending and paying attention in class... for what, exactly? I’m not saying a good lecture can’t teach anything that’ll stick, but most good teachers should know that much of what they say is lost on their listeners. That’s why repetition is such a common pedagogical technique. Neither do I intend to insult my professors, who no doubt work very hard on their lectures -- in fact, I’d consider most of my professors to be experts in their respective fields. I’m simply challenging the role of the lecture in my education. Instead of packing them with information and cramming a rushed presentation into an hour-long lecture, what if a “lecture” were a mere discussion or demonstration of the material? I have nothing but the utmost respect for my professors - I believe that teaching is one of the most challenging and humbling professions, if one cares enough to do it properly. Yet all but a handful of them clearly don’t consider themselves teachers, but lecturers. They’re experts in their fields, yet they’re being asked to perform as pedagogical experts. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that most of my professors sport thick foreign accents, whether Russian, Chinese, Polish, or French, making it difficult for even the most determined of students to follow their increasingly-oppressive lectures. Serving up information in this manner is both condescending and mildly insulting to students. We aren’t expected to behave as adults, learning on our own time and in our own manner. Instead, the information is spoon-fed to us; information is served in cold, indigestible chunks, and we’re expected to chew and swallow. This gourmond approach to communication is almost never effective, yet my university practices it like a religion. As an alternative, what might happen if we did treat students as adults? In the few instances I’ve seen where the professor expects the students to study out of class, I’ve watched my peers step up to the plate like the grown men and women they are. Those classes treated lecture as a time to ask questions to the professor, someone who is no doubt deeply knowledgeable on the subject, and for students to discuss concrete examples of the course material. This relieves pressure from the professor, who no longer has to pack information into one stressful, dreaded hour three times a week, and frees them to do what they do best: perform admirably on problems in their field. Lecture material, if any, is posted online to enable further study. As it stands, however, lectures are useful for nothing more than figuring out what the professor will put on the test. Skipping class seems wise! My time would, beyond doubt, be better spent in the library, studying a textbook and letting my mind assimilate the information in its own manner and on its own time. It might not help me figure out what’s on the test, but ultimately, I’m here to learn about a field of study, not about a set of tests. What do you think? In this world of information-packed lectures -- largely available online after the fact -- is it wise to skip class and be your own teacher?

I thought this was awesome - here's a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino processor working together with a bunch of custom electronics and medical-grade pumps to make an automated bartender machine that can mix together ingredients within 1 mL! The robot generates its own wifi network and web interface over which users can order and customize drinks. There's a cool video on their Kickstarter site in the link, check it out!

To me, the greatest thing about the Raspberry Pi is the way it's changing the way I think about computing. A thought experiment in lightweight computing led me to reevaluate my long-standing choice of development environment. I was accustomed to developing in Eclipse, an excellent open-source IDE with plugins for several languages. However, Eclipse is too heavyweight (i.e. too CPU- and RAM-intensive) to run on the Pi, and it often has stability issues (though not as badly as a comparable Microsoft product). While Eclipse offers an impressive project management feature set, the overall experience can wear on you - the interface relies heavily on mouse usage, and the editor leaves much to be desired. Enter vim: “VI iMproved,” easily the most impressive program I’ve ever seen. Vim is an open-source text editor with an astonishing set of tools for manipulating text in complex ways. Seeing an expert vim user in action is an inspiring spectacle. Vim is so advanced that sites like vimgolf.com host competitions for people to solve puzzles using vim, including listing the first 100 prime numbers and converting XML to JSON, with the fewest number of keystrokes possible. There’s a steep learning curve involved with getting to know vim, but screencast sites like vimcasts.org and Derek Wyatt’s blog have helped me tremendously. Vim’s features are incredible, and it’s difficult to grasp them all. You can store text into variables called “registers” for later use, record macros, replace words without spamming “backspace”, visually select and move text, insert text in the same column of multiple rows all at once, “fold” your code, and much, much more. In addition to the impressive default features, vim offers both customization and extensibility. I can define hotkeys to compile my program, check for errors, skip to the first or next error, run my program, and display the output -  all without leaving vim. The few features I missed from the Eclipse editor, like code auto-completion and bracket-matching, are available via simple vim plugins. I encourage you to find lightweight alternatives to the software you use every day, too! Using vim with my Raspberry Pi has afforded me a degree of portability that I never thought possible. Now, I can access my entire development environment over SSH, turning any machine I’m on into a developer box. What’s more, vim is far more stable than Eclipse ever was. By leaving behind my resource-hungry IDE, I’ve actually *gained* features that matter to me and lost features that had no use to me. I’ll be adding a few more posts about my adventures with vim in the coming days. including a link to my .vimrc and links to my favorite plugins. Thanks for reading!

My Experience with Accessories The Pi’s convenient USB connectivity will undoubtedly serve you well during setup and deployment. If, however, you want to connect more USB devices than the ports allow, you can use a powered or unpowered USB hub. A word of caution, however: unpowered hubs rely on the Pi itself to power their connected devices, and this might cause abnormal behavior on the software side if the Pi isn’t getting enough power to itself or the connected devices. In fact, power issues are a very common problem among Pi owners. If you’re going to connect power-hungry devices like external HDDs to your Pi, it’s best to use ones that supply their own power, or to operate them through a powered USB hub. One important feature for many users will be wifi connectivity. Many home setups have routers that are simply inaccessible via ethernet, and will require a wireless connection. Fortunately, the Edimax Wireless Nano USB Adapter (http://amzn.com/B005CLMJLU) offers a power-efficient solution to this problem in a tiny form-factor that works out-of-the-box with the Pi if you’re running Raspbian (Raspberry + Debian = Raspbian).  I’ve also found a similarly-sized generic bluetooth adapter for the Pi, I bought it for $0.99 USD here: http://amzn.com/B001EBE1LI This also worked out-of-the-box with the Pi and it connected to my PS3 Sixaxis and Dualshock 3 controllers just fine. Lastly, if you’re looking to embed the Pi in other hardware, you might not have access to a power outlet. Fortunately, the 4000mAh Sinoele external battery bank (I bought it here for $12: http://amzn.com/B009430HT8) offers a portable solution to this: 4000mAh is roughly 10+ hours of Pi battery life, and it can put out power fast enough to run the Pi on its own. Plus, the battery is equipped with an LED and is capable of charging anything that takes power over USB - handy for when your cell goes dead or the power goes out at home. Coming up next... Phew, now that we’ve got the hardware out of the way, let’s move on to the software! (My favorite part, ofc) My next post will cover the traditional use-cases for the PI and the corresponding choices of OS. I’ll also go over how to get started with Raspbian. Soon after, we’ll go over the meaty stuff: applications for the Pi, my thoughts on integrating Chrome OS and the Pi, and how to use this wonderful device for development, entertainment, and even art!

Meet the Raspberry Pi, the $25-$35 computer that's changed the way I think about software and lightweight computing. My next several posts will detail various aspects of Pi ownership, from choosing the right hardware to installing an OS to my own experience in deploying the Pi for a wide variety of applications!

Forgive the off-topic indulgence, but this is me and Emma, my companion in everything. (I'm the slightly-less-hairy one)

To install it, simply unzip the archive to a folder of your choice, go to chrome://extensions/ in a new tab, check the "Developer Mode" box (don't you love doing that?) and select "Load Unpacked Extension". From there, select the folder you made earlier, and you should be good to go.